ENHANCING SITUATIONAL AWARENESS IN EMERGENCY OPERATIONS THROUGH GIS IN CONTEXT OF PAKISTAN

Situation awareness is an important and critical activity for every operation that requires progressive monitoring and analysis for audit and improvement of the process by concerned authorities. The job can be automated and can be managed through software utilities. The modern state of the art technology called Geographic Information System (GIS) has enhance the war fighting capability in a dynamic way with rapid response. Recent advancements and cooperation of previous standalone technologies especially in the field of geographic information systems, remote sensing (RS), communication, computing, imaging, electronics, telemetry, navigation, and above all miniaturization have opened new avenues for information collection and transmission from the field under the constantly evolving incident reporting and management frameworks attuned to geophysical and socio-economic environment. While manifestation of these frameworks may vary, above mentioned technologies are now accepted as fundamental enablers in the ‘Incident Reporting and Management Cycle' to meet the informational requirements in a prompt, collaborative and efficient manner. With information being pivotal, ‘information cycle' of acquisition, collation, analysis, and dissemination integrates it into the decision making. However, at the onset of incident, intensive information requirements related to command, control, coordination and cooperation usually exceed available information. Rescue Operations in all its phases are essentially pivoted on decision making that required updated information from the field. Floods of 2010-2012 and Awaran Earthquake have highlighted that information from the field remained unstructured with delayed availability to the relevant decision makers. Resultantly, response in all phases of disaster management was adversely affected. Based on the lessons learnt while providing geospatial support to these rescue operations, ‘PakApp' has been designed and implemented, it is a system composed of GPS enabled cameras, smart phones and associated information and communication technologies to overcome the identified information shortfalls and bottlenecks. The system enables the field operators to capture the geo-coded imagery, annotate it, fill the structured data collection forms and pass to Emergency Operations Centers (EOCs) in near real-time. At EOCs this information can be associated with other sources, collated, analyzed and disseminated for informed decision making enabling proactive responses at various tiers. While few system components such as GPS enabled cameras were fielded during rescue operations. It is envisaged that adoption of this cost-effective field deployable capability would enhance capacity of rescue management system in concerned institutions of Pakistan. In this research work, we identified the requirements and capabilities for common product of Web-based GIS and shared them jointly, which allowed us to regenerate many of the different objects and software variants which allow software engineer to configure his own application. We then define the functionality and technical architecture of a highly configurable system that uses current technology to develop web-based applications. Lastly, we designed a tool to configure and assemble components to generate desired products. Subsequently the proposed platform is so flexible to create own GIS product as per the specific needs of each customer.